A Free Powerful NTFS Permissions Reporter

You’ve got a large shared folder to manage with a lot of sub-folders that go as many as 15 levels down. Some of the sub-folders may or may not have inherited permission turned on while some others just have different owners. Is there an easy way to get a full picture of what’s been set up?

NTFS Permissions Reporter, from the same people who created File Permission Check, is a powerful reporting tool designed to make your life easier to view NTFS Permissions of any folder trees of your choice. No matter how deep your folders are, it allows you to quickly see which groups and users have access to which directories and lets you to export for future reviewing.

Depending on the size of your folder structure, the report sometimes could be very big. There are a few options to reduce the size of the report, such as, you can reduce the number of columns included in the report from Options under Tools, or Exclude Directories that you don’t already know are ok. Furthermore, if you are on a Paid Standard edition, you can set up the Filter to significantly narrow down the result. Filter is a big part of NTFS Permissions Reporter but unfortunately it’s only available in Standard edition which isn’t free.

You can simply start to run the report on any local drives and mapped network drives. You can also add new target directories if you don’t want to start off from the root. If scanning encounters any folders that it doesn’t have the access, it will show up in red in the Error Log section. And you can save the log if needed.

The Standard edition of NTFS Permissions Reporter costs $149 per user but it does offer a Free edition with features that are good enough to many of IT Pros. It works on most Windows Platforms, including Windows 7, 8.1. It works best in a AD-powered domain network.